The Old Town School of Folk Music in Lincoln Park has long been a place where people played music and created community. Parents brought babies and toddlers to the school to get their first taste of guitar. Students brought binders of music to classes and then carried them over to local bars where they kept on playing. Aspiring and established musicians alike met collaborators, friends and even spouses at the folk music mainstay.

But on Monday, the Chicago institution announced that its longtime Lincoln Park location, 909 W. Armitage Ave., was on the market. The sale will seed an endowment fund with a short-term target of $10 million, according to Executive Director Bau Graves.

The endowment will be put toward general operations and help the struggling nonprofit, Graves said. The Lincoln Square location will remain open. But some students and faculty of the school aren’t ready to pack up their guitar cases at the Armitage location just yet.

Lindsay Weinberg, a teaching artist at the Old Town School, said the “magic of music” has brought people together at the Armitage location.

“And the teaching has always been at the heart of the institution,” said Weinberg. “So to make a move like this for the seeming disregard for the students and teachers who would be affected, it has left us all stunned.”

The Old Town School of Folk Music opened Dec. 1, 1957, originally at 333 W. North Ave.

“One student stepped up to the mike,” the Tribune reported in April 1958. He “asked the audience to smile, took a snapshot, then hitched his guitar around his neck and sang, ‘Michael Row the Boat Ashore.’”

The two-story Armitage location, part of the Aldine Building and protected in a city landmark district, opened in 1968 and served as the main hub of the nonprofit through 1998, when the Lincoln Square location opened in the former Hild Library building.

“I like to call it the mothership,” Old Town School program manager Jimmy Tomasello said about the Armitage building. “You walk into the building and there’s a feeling of magic because it’s been around for a long time.”

The sale of the Armitage building was announced at a staff meeting Monday morning. Tomasello said he has since fielded “an endless stream” of emails from students and their families. Hundreds of others have taken to social media to voice their concerns about the sale.

Some teachers at the Armitage location were in the middle of lessons Monday afternoon when they learned the building would be sold.

“The whole teaching day yesterday was just a series of breakup conversations,” Weinberg said.

The magic of music is that that can happen and it can bring people together. The Armitage location is one of the places where that magic took place.— Lindsay Weinberg, a teaching artist at the Old Town School

Graves acknowledged the news took people by surprise, but the board of directors had been considering the sale for several months, he said.

“They made that decision in a board meeting on Thursday night,” Graves told the Tribune, noting that it was a unanimous decision. “Prior to that decision, I didn’t feel comfortable taking this issue into the larger Old Town School community.”

Graves also said the school is facing a tough financial future, partly because of the rise and accessibility of online music instruction.

Graves wouldn’t comment on specific claims in the petition but said, “Almost every paragraph in there has got inaccuracies or deliberate outright falsehoods and I don’t want to dignify it with a response.”

In the petition, Gordon said, “The Armitage building is being sold because the School can’t afford to operate three buildings at current class enrollment levels. But by selling the building, the School will see student enrollment decline even further, which means the death spiral will continue.”

Gordon, who is married to Tribune Deputy Editorial Page Editor Marie Dillon, said in an interview that he decided to take action to try to save his “home away from home” because current leadership isn’t prioritizing students or teachers — and is not using funds effectively.

“I use the term death spiral in the petition because I really think they’re in a death spiral,” he said.

Families who frequent the Armitage location say what they’ll miss the most about the school is the community they’ve found at the weekend jams and classes.

Ana Mohill said she has brought her son and daughter to classes at the Armitage location for more than seven years.

“It’s like our second home,” she said. “We’re devastated this is happening. My son is so upset.”

News of the sale also hit teachers in the middle of an ongoing organizing effort.

Michael Miles, who started teaching at the school in 1979, said he sent a note to the board president and executive director asking them to reconsider and table the decision.

“What I’m suggesting that they do is that they reach back to the teachers and let them — if that decision to sell the building is the right decision — let the teachers participate in that decision,” said Miles. “They’ve been asking all along to have a say in the future of the school.”

Graves said the school has worked out a plan for accommodating the classes, teachers and students from the Armitage location and also is looking at satellite operations in different city locations.

“We don’t anticipate there being any large change in the accessibility of our classes,” he said.

Still, teachers worry there won’t be enough space at the Lincoln Square location to house all classes and that the school will lose students who can’t travel farther north.

“There are a lot of people who live there who take classes there, that’s kind of obvious,” Weinberg said about the Armitage location. “But it’s closer to the freeway, it’s closer to Lake Shore Drive and it’s further south. So that is the location that serves people that I think come from a wider variety of neighborhoods.”

But the coveted Lincoln Park location should help make a solid dent in the $10 million endowment goal.

Graves said he anticipates the sale, expected to close in June, will bring in somewhere around $4 million but that he doesn’t “really have any way of knowing.”

Michael Marks, a managing director of Cushman & Wakefield who is handling the sale, said they’re “going to go out unpriced purposely, because there are, as you can imagine, a lot of different perspectives on value and what the potential use is.”

Some in the community hope to see another cultural institution fill the space, Marks said.

For students and teachers at the Armitage school, they’ll have to take their community somewhere new.

“The magic of music is that that can happen and it can bring people together,” Weinberg said. “The Armitage location is one of the places where that magic took place.”